St. Patrick’s Curriculum Rationale

Our curriculum is currently under review. Please bear with us whilst we strive to ensure our children have the best experience and opportunities throughout their school career.

The community of St Patrick’s Catholic Primary School: children, staff, parents and governors have collaborated closely to devise an inspiring, child-centred curriculum for the pupils of St Patrick’s. Our curriculum is implemented with a view to improving further the high quality of our pupils’ learning experiences. Our school motto is “Be the best that you can be” and we place a strong emphasis on challenge for all our children to enable them to learn and develop their skills to the best of their ability. We strive to ensure our children are motivated and inspired to want to learn by ensuring a broad and balanced delivery of the National Curriculum with exciting, stimulating, cross-curricular links, based on common values, decided upon as a community:

Faith – Family – Respect– Resilience – Resourcefulness – Responsibility – Reflectiveness

Our curriculum aims:

To educate our children in the Catholic faith, encouraging our pupils to live and act according to the gospel values.
To be respectful of the communities in which they live and have an awareness of their own and other religious and spiritual development.
At our school we strongly promote self-respect for all in our school irrespective of race, creed or gender. Care will be taken to ensure that resources do not present stereo-typical images, rather role models from diverse backgrounds and cultures reflecting the multi-ethnic nature of our society
To be aspirational as life long learners and independent thinkers.
To be global citizens showing an awareness of their changing world, including how their environment and society have changed over time.
To enable children to have self-respect, high self-esteem and to be able to live and work co-operatively with others.
To promote a positive attitude towards learning, so that children enjoy coming to school, and acquire a solid basis for lifelong learning;
To enable children to be creative and to develop their own thinking;
To help children understand the importance of justice, truth and fairness, so that they grow up committed to equal opportunities for all;
To provide opportunities for meaningful enrichment experiences across the curriculum to strengthen and deepen learning.
To fulfil all the requirements of the National Curriculum.

Curriculum structure and assessment:

All subjects are taught discretely in half termly blocks and where sensible the subjects are linked to deepen learning and make the curriculum unique to our children.

Assessment opportunities are carefully planned into the curriculum. Children’s progress across the curriculum is continually monitored over the year, with teachers ensuring that any gaps are addressed.

Enrichment opportunities:

At St Patrick’s we pride ourselves on enabling our children to have a plethora of experiences while at our school. The wide range of extra curricular clubs ranging from debating to crochet, visits and visitors help our children to widen their life experiences and raise aspirations.

We regularly seize opportunities to work in new partnerships to bring unique experiences and opportunities for our children. Recent projects have involved children collaborating with Alder Hey Hospital working alongside heart surgeons, designers and parents to create new technology to support children with heart conditions. A project with the Unity Theatre has enabled a group of our talented writers to collaborate with actors, musicians and scriptwriters.

SEND across our curriculum

At St Patrick’s Catholic Primary School, we pride ourselves on ensuring a very inclusive education for all children and will endeavour to support every child regardless of their level of need. All pupils are supported to achieve the highest levels of success within the National Curriculum and all staff have high expectations of all children. We offer a variety of support depending on the individual needs of each child and this applies across all curriculum subjects. We strive for Quality First Teaching throughout the curriculum and this is monitored and reviewed regularly. Teachers utilise various support and interventions for those children with SEND including visual support, differentiated / parallel activities and pre teaching vocabulary and information as well as active learning (such as role play and drama) and using ICT to record learning.

Our curriculum has been designed inline with legislation and complies with the Equality Act (2010) and SEND regulations (2014).

To find out more information about each of our curriculum subjects please click on the dedicated pages where you will find information about that subject’s rationale, topics and aims.

Enabling children to try new experiences will broaden their horizons, raise their aspiration and give opportunities to succeed.